All the students, all the monitors, all the workshops, all the programs: the new year and school year begins in Lábrea, Tapauá, and Pauiní with spirit and impetus. The Recollect religious have been working for the dignity and quality of life of the beneficiaries.
The three Hope Centers that the Prelature of Lábrea and the Augustinian Recollects managed in the Brazilian Amazon welcome in a model of personalized attention in the style of a day center, in morning and afternoon shifts, to minors and adolescents of both sexes while they are not in school.
There are more than half a thousand beneficiaries who have the opportunity to learn in computer workshops, music (keyboard, guitar), crafts, embroidery, or cooking, among others, while they receive a reinforced snack and also have spaces for sports, green areas, and school reinforcement.
The school year continues in Brazil during the calendar year, so the holidays are over in January and February, and the carnival festivities, which stop the entire country, until most remote areas of the Amazon, the three Esperanza Centers have already launched been carrying out its ordinary activities in recent weeks.
In Lábrea, as a special moment, the students were able to talk to and receive eight bishops from the southwestern Dioceses of Amazonas, Acre, and Rondonia, who constitute the Northwest Region of the Brazilian Episcopal Conference.
For one of them, it was a particularly emotional meeting: the Augustinian Recollect Joaquín Pertíñez, currently bishop of Rio Branco, capital of the state of Acre, was in the 90s of the last century, one of the initiators and promoters of the first of the Centers, which in 2024 will complete 30 years of life.
In Pauiní the tasks began with a meeting of the Augustinian Recollect Alfonso Lázaro, who directs the Center, with the parents of the students. These Meetings are repeated monthly and seek to make the Center itself a space for support for families.
The first days have been full of dynamics of presentation and reception, a lot of games and sports, the configuration of each of the groups, and the implementation from the beginning of an environment that unites apparent opposites, such as responsibility and fun, effort and healthy leisure, commitment and exercise of personal freedom.
The objective is to offer the beneficiaries all those opportunities that are available to them denied a priori in Amazonian societies due to isolation, poverty, impunity for crime, or the lack of public policies aimed at minors.
We refer especially to the opportunities to count in an effective and free with learning techniques, adult support, safety from illegal activities, abuse or exploitation, improving school performance, the promotion of social and solidarity values, the enrichment of personality and interiority, in short, an integral growth in all aspects of the person: physical, intellectual, ethical, and spiritual.
